Baby Gammy highlights risks of commercial surrogacy, says author

Karen Hardy

Author and child psychiatrist Dawn Barker wants everyone to remember there’s a child at the heart of the story of baby Gammy.

Barker did extensive research into surrogacy for her latest novel, Let Her Go, which looks at altruist surrogacy within a family and the consequences the action has for everyone involved, but she can see parallels with the commercial surrogacy story of Gammy.

"What this has really highlighted for me is how do we assess the risk to the child in these arrangements," said Barker, who works as a child psychiatrist in Perth when she isn’t writing.

"How will he be when he’s old enough to understand the story surrounding his birth?

"If we believe he was actually rejected because of his disability, what a profound effect that would have on a child."

Barker says there isn’t a lot of research into the outcomes for children born through surrogates, especially once they become teenagers. In Let Her Go, a central character is the teenaged Louise, carried by her half aunt when her own mother is unable to fall pregnant herself, and her reactions to finding out her family’s secrets.

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Let Her Go also touches on the idea of mother and infant bonding and whether this happens in the womb or through the act of parenting. The mother of three children under five, Barker, 36, said she became intrigued by the idea when she was pregnant.

"I started to think about how a woman could relinquish a child. When is a child yours, what makes a child yours, when does that bonding happen? Is it a biological link? Something you get through pregnancy or does it happen through the act of raising a child? Perhaps it’s a little bit of everything in the end."

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Barker is buoyed by the actions of Gammy’s surrogate mother Pattharamon Janbua, who seems to have accepted Gammy as her own.

"To see Gammy’s mother, how accepting she has been of him, she seems like a special woman who has accepted a child, who’s biologically not hers and has a disability, into her family.

"It goes back to the idea of when does bonding happen. She’s made a few statements where she said something about if the parents come and try and get him back they’re not taking her baby, how she bonded with him in utero when she was pregnant, how she felt like it was her baby all along."

Barker says Pattharamon’s actions also highlight one danger of commercial surrogacy. To undergo altruistic surrogacy in Australia, all women involved have to undergo extensive counselling to ensure there are minimal complications about who the baby belongs to.